As US truckers head to DC, what welcome awaits them? Writer Leslie Rollins tells a cautionary tale.

Close

Rollins: Events in Canada have captured our attention, and Americans need to understand why. Our interest in affairs in our northern neighbor is not just neighborly: what happened in Canada was in fact a template for the suppression of freedom right here in the United States. Surprising as it is, the harbinger of the American future just might have unfolded – in frigid Ottawa.

Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the 1988 Emergencies Act for the suppression of the public protests that had been wracking Canada – and especially Canadian national government and border crossings – for the past several weeks. The protests, with their roots in COVID-19 vaccine mandates in the trucking sector, grew into a full-on populist rejection of Canadian-elite governance. The Canadian elites understand this clearly, and that’s why they moved to crush it.

It’s worth understanding just why Canada’s national leadership, helmed by Trudeau himself, reacted with horror to popular protest against unpopular policy. Some of it is rooted in Canadian political identity and history: Canada, as a state, has its inception in the rejection of American-style republicanism, and those old habits of managerial governance persist.

Much more of it is rooted in the Canadian elites’ full-on embrace of a transnational, upper-income, Davos-inflected ideology that might be called – to borrow a term – globalist. You saw it in the rhetoric deployed by Trudeau and his Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, as they said, repeatedly, that the protests were “making us poorer,” and that they damaged Canada’s standing in the eyes of other nations.

There was considerably less rhetoric devoted to the perceptions of Canadians, on whose behalf the rulers presumably rule. What no doubt came across as a measured argument around boardroom tables occupied by advanced-degree holders was communicated to ordinary people – and not just in Canada – as a plea, backed by force, to get back to being compliant economic units. In this framework, the essential dignity of man, Canadian and otherwise, is subsumed – as is his freedom.

But, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has declared, “freedom” “has become common among far-right groups.” This is one of the great calumnies perpetrated by the intersection of Canada’s elite interests, for whom the CBC and most major Canadian media is a willing handmaiden.

A protest movement demanding the right to simply be left alone is vilified as extremist and even violent. “This is not a peaceful protest,” intoned Trudeau, but neither he nor anyone else pointed toward actual violence perpetrated by the Canadian citizens’ movement. Blocking roads in Ottawa may have been disruptive and inconvenient – and indeed it was intended to be exactly that, it amounted to a mere fraction of the disruption caused by Canadian-elite COVID-19 panic across two years – but it was by no means violent.